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Monday, August 31, 2015

VPNs get unstable ahead of Chinese WWII parade

As a military parade will take place in Beijing this week to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of the second world war, a number of services used to get around Chinese internet restrictions have been taken down or disrupted. VPN users in China will have limited access in the first week of September.

It's never easy to guess why Chinese authorities choose a particular moment to crack down on internet accessibility. But for such a historical event, Chinese authorities are sure to inspect on the Internet. Some VPNs as well as other anti-censorship apps are down during this period. VPNs send all your datas through a encrypted tunnel, change your IP address to allow you bypass the Great Firewall (GFW). An individual in Beijing might connect to a VPN in England, so they can access content that is blocked within their own country without traveling abroad, or a Hulu user one side of the globe may surf as though they're somewhere else in order to watch programing that's only available in certain parts of the planet. Some most common VPN protocols have become unstable ahead of the upcoming military parade. Protocols including Cisco IPSec, L2TP/IPSec and PPTP will be affected. One of the VPN provider Astrill warned users on last Wednesday that they may suffer service outages between now and the parade on September 3. "Due to upcoming Beijing's military parade next week, China is cracking down on IPSec VPNs using GFW auto-learning technique," Astrill said in a message to users. Users may find VPNs got blank or servers show timeout for several minutes, or even get stuck when started and connect to any servers. I use FlyVPN and find it takes more time to open its app today, and its HongKong servers are not so stable as usual. It's very upsetting to find disconnected from the outside world, no Gmail and no Facebook, no information from the world. Fortunately, VPN service on routers, PCs and Android devices will hardly be effected as they use more resilient protocols.